Tag: community

I don’t remember how I felt when Princess Diana died (BBC). I remember the news riddled with grief I could not feel. I remember days of shock I could not fathom. I remember a car crash as important to me as a local crash on the state line, and I remember a very beautiful woman all over that coverage whose name I could only place by way of scrolling credits. I don’t remember how I felt, or where I was, or why it was so sad.

9/11 though! I remember 9/11 (CNN). I remember where I was when I was pulled off the playground early by obviously distracted teachers. I remember the news broadcast replacing English. And Math. And History. I remember a fast-moving clock and those burning towers. I remember a discussion of what half-staff flags meant and I remember the frequently disappearing children of armed forces officers getting picked up before I myself left the school around noon. I cried heavy tears. A few of my classmates lost a parent.

Samantha Logan. Copy of Artist Unknown, 2014

The impact of 9/11 has defined much of my political and economic opinions. It defined a presidency, a war in the middle east, and an economic crisis. One of my three most impacted art pieces (right) I posted on this blog earlier was a direct critique on the war in Iraq (“Art Appreciation”). Looking at that piece brings that feeling back. That connection I felt to Andrew, the short buzz-cut kid whose mother came to pick him up and who did not return to class for two weeks. A painting brings back those feelings, and the community I was a solid part of in that moment.

My experiences of 9/11 and that of Princess Diana, were very, very different situations. Both were devastating and defined a decade. But my response to each represents a profound difference in what it means to be a part of a community in its context. Most profoundly, it exemplifies Arts’ place in community discourse.

The Cindy Sherman Clown Series I discussed last week in “how to get art” were inspired by the 9/11 attacks (Logan & Baker). They were about taking the raw emotions felt by America and placing them on the faces of a few clowns in a career permitted to show those emotions. Those clowns have cut across time.

That said, I would like to reflectively underscore the purpose of my previous few blogs: Community is required to understand art, but art, provides a most valuable service, to communities and their networks by gluing them together. In art and in writing feelings are royal, but context is queen. It is in the presence of context that the art of Cindy Sherman, becomes vital and important to any community looking desperately to find that visceral connection between and with others.

Work Cited (Read More):

P.S: My heart goes out to the victims of the London attack earlier today. Attacks like these, and the media on the news that it represents brings about these same feelings – they always have, and it is always a tearing feeling to know that emotion is raw and new for the families involved. To learn more an up to date report is provided here (Dewan & Moorhouse).

In the past 3 [ 1, 2, 3 ] manifesto blogs we’ve published, a lot of heat has been placed on the brick-and-mortar LGBT+ organizations and the grant foundations that fund them. We criticize them in saying they are not proactively seeking to expand their reach to the ‘invisible’ individuals in need of it, but in this blog we at TYC want to make it absolutely clear that the LGBT+ organizations are not at all the problem. Rather, expanding their audiences is the solution to getting resources and support to the invisible community we feel needs them.

Partner organizations have thus far been unable to permeate the “closet barrier” – or access the invisible community of closeted, stealth, questioning, and under sourced – for a variety of reasons revolving around lack of resources of their own, lack of funding from organizations, the “overhead” myth, and traditional marketing, business, and media tactics that are not capable of reaching the invisible audience.

Trans* Youth Channel’s mission has been to get the invisible community these resources brick-and-mortar organizations have earlier in their journeys, but because partner organizations are just as limited as the invisible community and have their own communities in need, it is difficult for them to cater these sources directly; in reality they are simply too strapped doing their own thing. It is therefore better for us at TYC to provide services for the organizations to more easily provide their content while also benefiting the invisible LGBT+ community in our programs:

In our Weekly Digest Program we will provide partner organizations’ content and resources, while also opening up an anonymous channel for invisible community members to email organizations their questions and request more resources. In our Support Group program we are heavily integrating partner organizations into facilitator trainings and providing our trainings for free to those organizations who participate. And in our content creation program we are especially spotlighting the great work that LGBT+ organizations have done in a manner that invisible community members can take advantage of safely and securely at no detriment to them.

Our weekly digest program seeks to keep the invisible community from having to dangerously search for scattered and difficult to find information online. We do the research for the invisible community, compile it, and send it directly to each invisible member’s private email address to save, download, and use however they wish.

How Partners Benefit

Partner organizations will directly benefit from this program in that we will offer each organization the opportunity to include their own expert content related to the weekly topic in the newsletter along with a link for members to contact them anonymously and inquire further about partner resources. Likewise if partners have any events or other things going on they can contact all 500 members of our list privately through our weekly digest to let them know quietly and discretely as opposed to often invasive social media and SEO tactics. The weekly digest is bound to be a boon for LGBT+ organizations and at the same time it provides the invisible community more opportunity to gain a trustworthy expert contact to help the invisible get over their hurdles.

Our support group program – still in development – is intended for community members to have a safe space to talk, interact with one another, and get peer support without having to go to an LGBT+ organization or if you are unable to access physical resources or it is too much anxiety.

How Partners Benefit

Partner organization will be mostly involved in a fully comprehensive training that all support group facilitators will be required to go through. Partners can add input to the trainings themselves so that facilitators are learning about suicide from the Trevor project and Trans* Lifeline, or about domestic abuse from RAINN and SAVA. About race from #BlackLivesMatter and NAACP. Additionally, any participating organizations in the training will be free to send any volunteer they like through the training at no cost to them and allow them to jumpstart their own support groups quickly and at very little cost.

This partner organization opportunity benefits the invisible community by providing a huge community of professionally trained and certified support group facilitators to go out into local communities or to run groups online that closely emulate a real physical support group. They will have the confidence in a facilitator that understands and has the means to support them.

The content creation programs is a content development platform for V-logs and Blogs that will allow us to inform and educate the general public in addition to the invisible community about various identity related hurdles and how to face them. It is intended to be widely encompassing from “how to transition” to coming out and it is very “expert” driven with well researched, shot, edited, and developed works.

How Partners Benefit

This last program is a very wide and encompassing opportunity that will allow partner organizations far more agency in how they speak to and assist the invisible community. In Trans* Youth Channel curated and developed content we will carry ‘sponsors’ for our content, and exhibit organization’s content in our own. If a partner has an event going on for instance we’ll make a video on the topic for it and include its relevancy the invisible community. It works much like the old TYC, but it will be up to partners to contact us about any developments.

These great bonuses for our partner organizations are joined with a myriad of smaller bonuses including a Facebook group with every organization’s leaders able to communicate and talk with each other, direct social media advice and campaign development from us as an online social media driven organization, and more!

Our partner organizations are a significant part of our mission statement and our success hinges on the willingness and desire for brick-and-mortar LGBT+ organizations to care about the invisible community. We truly value our partner’s honest attempts to extend their reach to the invisible community and hope to continue facilitating this in the future.

Reaching out to an Invisible LGBT+ community – those who are closeted, stealth, questioning, or in under-resourced areas – is inherently problematic. If the audience is invisible how exactly does one create services that understand, reach out, and make an effort to support them? In traditional business the “market profile” solves the problem of not understanding the audience a product is made for by doing often costly research. By earnestly listening to people one hopes to reach, one can create a profile of their likes, dislikes or commonalities, and then cater the product or service to them. It is a wonderfully powerful tool that still enriches our businesses today and is responsible for the ridiculous amounts of Ragu spaghetti sauce or pepsi flavors on your supermarket shelves today.

On the other hand however, this “market profile” has come to be expected in the world of non-profits which has made things rather difficult for the community LGBT+ nonprofits seek to support. Grant foundations expect that when they give a nonprofit money to do a project that organization has already done the research necessary to accurately predict how well the service or product will be received by what audiences and to what end.

The invisible community on the other hand, is identified by way of not having a public voice due to hurdles and anxieties so the invisible community legitimately cannot inform foundations of their presence, who they are, and what they need to the extent foundations require. This of course comes to the detriment of this same community. Trans* Youth Channel happens to be the only organization catering to such a community almost precisely because all other organizations find it a risky venture to spend precious donation funds on. Although many programs are at the invisible community’s fingertips and a world of online sites have inadvertently provided parts of what invisible people need, no one makes or provides services directly for them so information is scattered, difficult to get to, and often comes with a mountain of hurdles and anxieties.

How can we reach that community to provide our services in a way that best suits them,

And can we do it in a way that convinces public organizations to invest in them?

The 3rd question is large so it will be the topic of our 4th manifesto blog, but in this blog we will focus on the first two questions. In order to achieve our mission of getting resources into the hands of invisible community members, while helping those members overcome their hurdles we first have to think creatively about how to safely contact them, then how best to accommodate them, and ultimately we must rely heavily on the grapevine of community members we already have to make up any short sights and learn about them.

Getting in contact:

If you are a 15 year old questioning invisible member of the community still living with your parents and without a job it is remarkably difficult to attain resources. Despite this however the invisible community has flocked to YouTube,

matthewsplace.com, and many other sites to attain the information they need to learn about their identities, come to terms with them, and then determine whether to come out. Getting involved in communities online is a dangerous proposition with the advent of the “real names” policy put forward by Facebook, and the ridiculous amount of hoops you have to jump through to protect your private information. Googling “how to come out to my parents” could elicit weeks of ad marketing that if on a family computer, could spell a bad “outing” experience for many youth.

Fortunately, Trans* Youth Channel is cleverly taking advantage of this system by using those ad spaces to warn those who “trip up” on Google, Facebook, and other platforms that they could be outed and in 5 easy steps teaching them how to avoid it. In doing so we are also establishing a 2 way mode of communication that is anonymous secure and safe for them to use, which provides them access to our weekly digest and support group programs.

Accommodating Invisible Community Members

As valuable as using google and other ads is for keeping the invisible community from being outed unexpectedly on Facebook, Trans* Youth Channel’s services would be equally useless if the invisible community felt insecure, or scared using our services or if we imparted a very real danger of outing them by way of leaking information. Many find making an account dangerous, lurking on one page for much too long to be risky, and posting on pages worrisome due to the chance that a friend could come across it. So if we are to keep the community safe Trans* Youth Channel must ensure that all of our programs and online interfaces are made to suit this audience and that means refraining from a few key analysis methods.

our promised values to community members

We at TYC are making a promise, right here and now:

We will not require any data on anyone – even for our own purposes – save for one email address (we recommend separate from your daily life) and an optional first name, unless it is provided directly to us for 1 time permissions, by survey, in the course of providing services, or if proactively offered to us by the legal owner of this information. We will rely as little as possible on any data or information provided to us by default from social media sites or other third parties, and we will not provide to other organizations any specific data on community members. Any data shared will be generic and with full confidentiality of those who provided it intact in accordance with university collection methods.

In this data driven world, businesses rely heavily on big data so such a promise is a big change, but for the invisible community, we feel it is a positive move in privacy that assists our community and the very intersectional net neutrality movement in maintaining a freedom of resources, community, and support that does not endanger them.

Relying heavily on the grapevine

Because we will be taking minimal information and all of that information can be entirely fictional in order to protect the security, safety and anonymity of the community, we are not going to be getting very much information on the invisible LGBT+ community unless we ask directly. It comes at a tremendous disadvantage and perhaps this is another reason organizations are so reluctant to help invisible members. Hopefully with the spreading of our word as a safe space, we can make up for that disadvantage through the grapevine; through people and word of mouth.

It is our take that the largest amount of contact anyone will have with the Invisible LGBT+ community will be interpersonal. It will be those individuals who are struggling to come out finding the courage and the opportunity to come out to one safe “out” LGBT+ individual in person or online. We’ve experienced this happen almost every day since TYC began and bloggers saw comments on our YouTube channels. There has always been a level of private mentorship that helped connect invisible members with ‘out’ LGBT+ individuals and we intend to better facilitate this very personal mode of assistance. By equipping those who are already connected to us and our partners with our programs and having them inform us on community needs, we can develop a stronger community of people who can speak with us anonymously through anonymous surveys and make up for what “big data” could immorally give us.

Even though there will be little grant funds and little assistance from big name organizations largely catering to an out community; even though little will be afforded to help us accomplish our mission of bridging the gap between the ‘out’ LGBT+ Brick-and-mortar nonprofits, we plan on having genuine safe, secure, anonymous and quality communication with the invisible community so that we can better understand them, meld our programs to their needs, and provide resources, community, and support sooner for them.

Next week we will discuss the third question put forward here and the other half of our mission statement: How do we convince public organizations to invest in the invisible community and in us?